Of Mothers, The Illusion of Control, and Training Yourself Out of a Job…

When I was a child my mother demanded 100% obedience.
Did I give it to her?
No.
Neither did I agree with everything she said or believed.

Many of the lessons she taught and that I employ have kept me in good stead as an adult, wife and mother. I thoroughly appreciate then.

Yet, I have often wished my mother could have supported me more in standing upon my own ground.
Better said, I would have appreciated immensely my mother supporting me in the areas where we differed in our perspectives on an issue.

When our youngest child reached five-years-old, I began teaching her how to say, plainly and clearly, “Mommy, I’m angry with you.” I was keen to her need for this type of support since the youngest children in families often feel less respected than older children.

Today, seven years later, that lesson has evolved into her quite often, and always with respect, saying, “Mommy, your hurt my feelings.”

Beneath all anger lives hurt.

The ability to state that we are angry, and/or more directly, that …we feel hurt… is an important and worthwhile skill to possess.

One’s ability to employ this skill can mean the difference between getting that promotion, maintaining one’s marriage or the relationship with a significant other, or as in our child’s case, getting a parent’s attention.

Time Magazine reports that research now shows that teenagers who quickly capitulate to a parent’s opinion or demands in an argument experience a greater challenge in standing up to fellow peers when urged to participate in dangerous behavior such as substance and overuse of alcohol.

As a mother of daughters, who like them, was once a young woman aiming to please my mother, I also know the catch-22 of which this article refers.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I am reminded each time I listen to a client that what we do with our parents, the nature of our relationship with our mothers and fathers, most particularly that parent of our same gender, establishes the foundation upon which we will interact and engage with others, and ourselves.

The ability to formalize one’s own opinions, state them and hold to them is a task not lost on girls and women.

Unlike men, who in speaking are often received as the font of wisdom, without regard for the words they speak, women are many times questioned and prodded to explain our statements. Sadly the people who challenge us to justify our stances are in many cases fellow women, and girls.

Ask any mother of a pre-adolescent girl to identify their daughter’s greatest difficulty in the social realm of the daughter’s life and most often what you will hear is, girl problems, cliques, she-said/she-said issues.

Not that girls do not graduate to interactions that involve the opposite sex or intimate relations with the same gender, and the requisite problems that accompany such relationships, but so much of what we do with those of our same sex during those pre-adolescent and teenage years lays the basis for what we can and will achieve in our personal and private interactions of the adult years.

The Time Magazine article, Arguing with Moms Helps Fend Off Peer Pressure reminds us that what we do with our parents, the nature of our interactions with those who are our first teachers sets the stage for the way in which we will engage with others, and how we view ourselves.

So often as parents we rely on what our parents did or did not accomplish with us as a blue print for how we will nurture our children.

Whether we liked our parents’ brand and/or style of parenting or whether it left us angry as a hill of red ants plowed up, what we underwent as a child with them a the helm affects us and how we will or do parent our own children.

I view the quality of my work as a psychotherapist from the vantage point of how quickly I can put myself out of a job.

This is not to say that I have and do not approve of working with clients over long periods of time, nor that under no circumstances are there any reasons for a client to engage the services of a psychotherapist for extended periods of time.

I invested nearly 3 decades in my own work as a client in psychotherapy.

Instead, I work from concept that my role as psychotherapist is to assist a client in finding ways to improve her or his interactions and relations with family, friends and colleagues. I view my ability to help a client reach a point where I am no longer needed as a success.

Parenting, the Time Magazine article reminds us, operates much the same way.

No parent wants to witness our child or children die before we do. We pray that they will live beyond us. In this way, our children offer us a taste of immortality.

As such we must nurture and teach, as the article states, from a perspective that includes fostering autonomy.
Accomplishing this may deliver a strong dose of discomfort. We are relinquishing the illusion of control that we hold on our children and that we would like to believe we possess on life.

In the midst of these chaotic moments the article suggests that we remember the entire purpose of all that we do as parents is to, much like my work as a psychotherapist with clients, “…[train] yourself out of the job.”